In 596 the missionary Pope Gregory sent a reluctant bishop, Augustine, to the court of Ethelbert of Kent to bring the ancient Roman colony of Britannia back to Rome. Augustine was startlingly successful, swiftly converting Ethelbert and founding a cathedral at Canterbury. Pagan Saxons retained their gods only for days of the week, Tiw, Woden, Thunor and Freya. But English Christianity was divided. The north had been evangelised from Ireland to the Ionan rite, its calendar and monastic tradition installed at Jarrow and Lindisfarne.

The dispute came to a head at the court of Oswy of Northumbria, who in 664 summoned Canterbury to a synod at Whitby, pitting Rome against Iona. Rome won, and England was to remain loyal to the mainstream of European ecclesiastical culture for almost a millennium.

England's political supremacy went first to Northumbria, with its capital at York in the 7th century, then to Mercia under Offa in the 8th, and then to Wessex. But in 790 disaster struck.

Concerted Danish raids attacked the east coast, and within two decades had turned into major colonial occupations. Lindisfarne was sacked. York became a Danish trading post.

Only in the 870s was there successful resistance from Wessex. Here King Alfred led an English victory against the Danish warlord, Guthrum, in 878 at Edington in Wiltshire, to become the first truly English king. He built castles, founded a navy, cohered a legal code and introduced a cadre of educated court scholars at Winchester. But no king could secure his legacy. By the end of the century Ethelred the Unready was paying Danegeld to ward off renewed Viking incursion, which culminated in the final conquest of England in 1015 by Canute.

This little-known but remarkable monarch ruled an empire from Kent to the north of Norway. An England which, since Whitby, had looked to Rome for its civilisation and faith briefly turned its back and looked north to Scandinavia.